Child safety seats for vehicles include their own safety belts and are generally mandated for children under four years old who weigh less than forty pounds. Child booster seats are used for larger children, typically four to eight year old children who weigh between forty and eighty pounds and are less than about 4 feet 9 inches tall.
Child booster seats raise the position of these children so that the child will be in an effective position to use the vehicle's seat belt system. These seats are sometimes called belt positioning booster seats.
Child booster seats typically include a seat member or seat cushion, a seat back, and seat arms on opposite sides of the seat. Some booster seats employ only a seat member and seat arms and employ the vehicle seat back as a seat back. Booster seats are positioned on the surface of a vehicle seat and may or may not be removably attached to the vehicle seat. One conventional attachment mechanism, called a LATCH connector system, comprises latches at the rear edges of the child seat that releasibly clip onto brackets called “ISOFIX wires” that are positioned at the bight between the seat back and seat cushion of a seat assembly. Seats can be manually clipped into and released from these brackets for mounting and dismounting the seat from the vehicle.
One of the drawbacks with a conventional child booster seat is that the seat cushion may be quite thick, perhaps four inches for a smaller child, and the thick seat together with the protruding arm rest is cumbersome and difficult to store when not in use. The seat is also inconvenient to transport for use on other vehicles, such as when a child is invited to ride in a friend's car or the child's family rents a car while on a trip.
An object of the present invention is to provide a personal, portable child booster seat assembly wherein the seat member and arm rests collapse into a compact and generally flat package that can easily be removed and transported by children and stored in the vehicle, a school locker, a back pack, car pockets, bus sidewalls, or elsewhere, and the collapsed seat assembly occupies a minimum of storage space. This invention provides a convenient solution for a motorist who occasionally transports children or who wishes to transport additional children without endangering the children by leaving them unprotected and without violating child booster seat laws in U.S. states and in Canada.